


out into the black

by underdebate



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: IVs, Mild Gore, Needles, Other, Psychological Trauma, Suicidal Thoughts, Torture, everything-works-out ending, mostly this is about nihlus and less about torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-07
Updated: 2014-09-07
Packaged: 2018-02-16 10:55:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,987
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2267100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/underdebate/pseuds/underdebate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nihlus is approved for solo missions.</p><p>It's too soon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	out into the black

When Nihlus is approved for solo missions—months and moons and one too many incidents of near-decapitation on Saren's watch later—he pretends like he doesn't know what it means.

He survives pretty well on his own. Once the job is done, the Council pulls him back, tapes him up, and sends him back out into the black with little more than a week's turnaround. There's no ceremony to it; he is not the first or the last turian to be appointed this position, and spirits know it's not a job with a retirement package.

But Saren is there. His mentor stands behind him a way's back as the mandate is read: _Spectre Kryik_. No other designation matters anymore. _Protected innocents at great personal cost_ , they say, and he can nearly feel Saren's eyes boring holes in the back of his skull for that one. _Upholds standards of integrity for all galactic life._

 _An invaluable asset to the Spectres_.

As they turn to leave, Saren's mandibles flicker. In his head, Nihlus calls it pride.

 

–

 

It's too soon. 

 

–

 

There's a storm inside his head. It's been raining for three days.

There's a storm inside his head. He is drowning. The static tastes like ozone and he keeps clutching at empty space near his hip, every hour forgetting anew that there is no pistol, every hour remembering that they have dislocated his arm at the elbow and he could not hold the gun if it did exist.

There's a storm inside his head. Every time they pull a tooth, it gets louder.

 

–

 

When the storm passes, his veins feel like they are on fire. Something in his head tells him to rip them out. He isn't properly restrained, but he can't tell why he didn't notice that before. Didn't he—wasn't he holding his gun?

He is lying on a table. Every nerve in his body feels like it's misfiring. He looks down the table at his body, at what feels like a great distance, and sees his hands clutching weakly at nothing.

There are no restraints, only bandages and IVs.

 

–

 

He's bleary when he finally regains his sense of self, takes stock of the environment around him.

It's a dilapidated old lab, and he hadn't imagined the rain. There are no windows through which to see it but the air around him is humid and he can hear it pattering against a metal roof, somewhere outside of his room. His instinctive sense of position tells him he's on the ground level and the building—wherever it is, whatever this is—is so far above sea level that the rain is almost not rain, but clouds.

All of his senses feel pumped full of stims and he's nauseous, swimming through each moment of awareness coming back online. The smell of the place is flora and copper, rich green so thick it's almost choking, blood on the tiles. He retches. Nothing comes up.

There are still no restraints.

His legs are numb, he realizes as he attempts to take stock of where his body hurts and realizes he simply—can't with anything below the knee joint. He looks down his body once again, struggles to prop himself up on his one good arm, but his head swims and refuses, and he concentrates, _tries_.

He watches his own feet twitch as if they're separate from his body, completely outside his control, to a growing sense of horror.

There is some dried blood on the table just behind his knees.

Eventually, his screaming brings someone from another room. They don't drug him when they knock him out again.

 

–

 

When he sleeps, he remembers that it was Saren who taught him how to resist torture. _There's always somewhere to go_ , Saren had told him. _They cannot hold you here, and nobody can harm you inside your own head._

That was before Saren had slipped him the drug. He slept for 18 consecutive hours and woke up weak, nauseous, and immediately submerged in freezing water.

His record was reported by Saren himself to the Council at ninety-two hours. He can resist interrogation at the hands of another Spectre for nearly four days. Among Spectres, this period of time is referred to as _valet service_ ; if he is to disappear, the Council will attempt to recover him for exactly ninety-two hours after his last point of contact. A courtesy pick-up.

After ninety-two hours, he will be declared shoot-on-sight.

He has no reference of time in this state, but he thinks it's been long enough.

 

–

 

And so it goes, the period between waking and sleeping more a living nightmare than anything his mind has conjured up in restless imaginings. Sometimes he's drugged, sometimes he's not. They have put water in his veins, waited until it was so thin that his heart beat like a frightened animal in his chest and he could not see. They have filled the room with tiny airborne proteins, levo, until his lungs spasmed and his eyes burned and he vomited nothing.

He cannot identify voices or even species; they wear padded white suits that reduce them to little more than bipedal creatures with two slender arms and round heads. Their hands, he finds, are well-defined for dexterity but always gloved, and he cannot tell the difference between an asari's hands or a human's; a quarian's or a salarian's.

 _What do you want_ , he asks one day, mouth so dry he can barely force the words out.

 _Nothing_ , they say.

 _Do you know who I am?_ , he asks later.

_We don't care._

 

–

 

He hallucinates vividly.

At first, he thinks he's found a way back inside his head; the hallucinations are comforting, quiet, simplistic. He sees himself sleeping next to a small human girl, both of them lying facing each other, her clutching his hands as she sleeps. She is so young, but he can feel the grip of her small fingers around his wrists; he doesn't know who she is but her presence is calming, and he drifts in and out of sleep.

Sometimes it's Saren. He's still hooked up to IVs but they're fluid drips now, and the room is the quiet of a Citadel hospital. His mentor stands next to his bed, brushes a hand down his forehead.

"Go back into your head, Nihlus. Stay there for now."

He leans up, barely, into the touch, and even in fever-wrought hallucinations Saren's eyes are impossible to read.

"Come find me," he finds himself saying, asking, _pleading._

Saren's fingers graze over his eyelids, closing them like a corpse.

 

–

 

When his system jolts itself back into present tense, someone is checking his pupil dilation with a pen light.

For all the equipment they've donned, something feels false about the rigorous testing of the white-clad figures around him. It seems nonsensical; he's tried and failed to pick up any thread of continuity, and the things they murmur between each other are curt and monosyllabic, too quiet for him to catch.

He is a corpse and they are rearranging his bones as they see fit, because they feel like it.

 

–

 

It feels like he has been inside the same room for weeks before anything changes. He's resigned himself to the fact that he has lost his legs, and the majority of his limbs are likely to follow if they keep being dislocated and relocated in such haphazard ways, leaving him immobile and barely capable of rolling to one side on a good day. He hasn't moved except for seizure-like spasms; has choked on his own vomit more than once. They have taken to injecting liquefied nutrients directly into his stomach, and he systematically forced to drink more water than he thinks his body can handle when they notice he coughs up blood.

Between sleeping and waking, he tries to form a semblance of days, but the hallucinations come to him without sleep and leave him with hours of lost time.

One day, a white-clad figure walks into the room and goes for his left leg, jabbing a finger into the smooth flesh behind his knee. He jolts and kicks weakly when he realizes he can feel it. Then he panics.

"Candidate Nihlus Kryik," the figure says, and he tosses his head, near hysterical with how improbable the words are. _No, I'm not,_ he thinks, _you're too late, they sent me too soon, I was a fluke_.

The figure is carefully sliding IVs out of his arms, removing breathing tubes, pinching the tips of his fingers one by one. He lays quietly; the hallucination will pass.

"You won't want to hear this right now, but welcome to the Spectres. I'm going to give you a few injections; they are adrenaline and painkillers."

This is absurd.

"Please don't try to move too quickly. Now, I'm going to check your extremities for damage; tell me if you feel any tingling."

 

–

 

He's in rehabilitation for three weeks, and spends the first twenty-four hours under heavy sedation after trying to assault anything within arm's reach and, when that failed, turning makeshift weapons on himself. After that, they let him move around but restrict him to a single room. The doctors do not wear masks.

It was six days, they tell him later; they artificially tampered with his circadian rhythm, making hours stretch into entire weeks. They anaesthetized his lower legs to keep him immobile. He will suffer no permanent damage; they are, after all, very careful and have done this before.

He offered no secrets, and they tell him this is very good.

There was no mission. Just this.

 

–

 

He's in de-traumatization therapy for longer than it takes his body to physically heal. They tell him he's progressing normally; they project a full return to active duty within the month.

When he can stand without shaking, Sparatus visits him. The doctors seem to appreciate that he has to be standing before anyone can enter the room.

"Spectre Kryik," he greets. Councilor Sparatus' compassion is a thin line drawn in the sand. He stares at the councilor, disbelieving.

Eventually, Sparatus shifts his stance. "We very rarely stage successful recoveries, Nihlus. Spectres carry a great burden of knowledge; we can train you to resist telling secrets when secrets will mean the end, but not when there are no secrets your captor truly wants."

He can't fully process what's being told to him until much, much later. He cannot even form the words.

Sparatus calls him 'Spectre' again before he leaves. The word is a thin coat of praise, painted over years upon years of horror.

 

–

 

He wakes up screaming again and again; Saren in his mind's eye, telling him _go back into your head_.

 _Come find me_ , he shrieks back, _come find me and wake me up_.

 

–

 

And eventually Saren does.

He doesn't have to question whether or not Saren knew what would happen when Nihlus was sent out. He sees it; his mentor's jaw is a firm line, his eyes deadened blue.

Instead, he asks, "Were you there?"

"Yes," Saren responds without hesitating. "Twice."

"Why?" His own voice is foreign and choked-off.

Saren's gaze flickers downwards, but when their eyes meet, he holds it. "The hallucinogenics conjure—somewhat less frightening imagery when a familiar face is actually present in the subject's reality. If you knew it was a hallucination, the illusion wouldn't be ruined."

"And the second time?"

"You asked me to come find you."

It breaks Nihlus, then. Not a moment later, Saren cups the back of his neck and pulls him against his chest, holding him just tight enough as Nihlus' fingers leave bruises on his arms.

 

–

 

He goes out into the black again, months later, as a Spectre with the power to overthrow regimes, deliver any untimely death he sees fit, and save lives.

He goes out into the black, and the storms are quiet.

He goes out into the black with Saren, and he is never alone.

 

**Author's Note:**

> On tumblr @ [underdebate](http://underdebate.tumblr.com), pretty much never not ready to talk about turians.


End file.
